For years, organized labor has worked hard to raise the minimum wage, while business groups have campaigned to block such a change. This week in the Senate, however, the AFL-CIO is pushing to kill the wage increase while practically the entire business lobby is demanding that it pass.

The reversal is the product of election-year politics and clever -- critics say devious -- legislative packaging that has been dubbed the "trifecta." In the same bill, senators are being asked to raise the minimum wage (the liberals' goal), cut the estate tax (the conservatives' objective) and approve a laundry list of popular, though narrowly targeted, tax breaks.

"The sides have flipped," said Peter R. Orszag, an economics scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Everyone who supported a minimum wage increase still does. Everyone who opposed it still does. Nothing has changed except the slimey, sleazy, satanic Republicans have attached poison pills to a min. wage increase -- precisely because they DON'T want it passed.

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